With Aid Ties Cut, West Bank Villagers Make Do

August 8, 1988|By Loren Jenkins, Washington Post

KFAR NIMEH, WEST BANK — They came along the sunbaked street silently and stoically in ones and twos, some aged and stooped, others with sickly toddlers in hand or clutching frightened babies to their breasts.

Patiently, they took their places on the hard-backed chairs set out under a giant fig tree. There they waited their turn for a makeshift clinic on the veranda of a simple two-room building that in better times had been used as a summer boys camp in this village of 2,500.

''What you are seeing here,'' said Dr. Jihad Mishal, a stethoscope hanging around his neck, ''is how we are managing to take care of ourselves, by ourselves, without the help of Israel or Jordan.''

On this clear summer morning at the end of the eighth month of the Palestinian revolt against the Israeli occupation, volunteer doctors and nurses had come to this isolated and militant town to care for the ill.

It was, he said, a model of the sort of back-to-roots, self-help programs that the Palestinians of the West Bank hope to set up in their quest for self- sufficiency to survive the tightening economic squeeze their revolt has wrought.

As officials in Israel, Jordan and the United States debate whether the Palestine Liberation Organization will rise to the challenge of the West Bank after King Hussein of Jordan last week decided to disengage from the troubled territory, Kfar Nimeh and similarly well-organized villages are looked upon as prototype communities for the independent Palestinian state that is the ultimate dream of the uprising.

''We think we can survive and continue our revolt, whether or not we continue getting the money that Jordan used to put in here,'' said one village elder, referring to King Hussein's decision to scrap a West Bank development plan and cancel payment of Jordanian government salaries and subsidies to 21,000 Palestinians in the area.

A stark town of yellow sandstone and concrete houses along the crests of a rocky hilltop in this undulating biblical land, Kfar Nimeh has set up its rudimentary local government that is striving to take care of the town's food, medical, unemployment and security needs. As such, its poor, rural citizens like to talk of it as a ''liberated Palestinian village.''

They call it that not because Israel cannot invade -- it has three times since the revolt began Dec. 9 -- but because the town's isolation and protection by a narrow gorge and winding mountain road has made controlling it more trouble than it is worth to the Israeli army.

Its trees and light posts are defiantly crowned with hundreds of small Palestinian flags, and its walls are painted with provocative anti-Israeli graffiti and such slogans as ''Mother, the feast is not for he who wears new clothes, but for those who die for their country.''

Since the uprising began, the town has been governed by a clandestine four-man committee of representatives of the four main Palestinian factions in the town -- Yasser Arafat's Fatah, the Democratic Popular Front, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Palestine Communist Party.

The ruling committee, townspeople here said, has developed subcommittees on agriculture, labor, medicine, education and security to cope with the most pressing needs. The agriculture committee deals with providing food through village cooperatives that raise sheep, poultry, cows, vegetables and olive seedlings.

''We are trying to become self-sufficient so that we need the help of neither Israel nor Jordan,'' said the unshaven, 37-year-old Palestinian who oversees a co-op of 60 sheep housed in neat pens in a reinforced concrete barn on the outskirts of town. ''We are able at cost to provide the people in the town with meat from our sheep and milk from our three cows.''

A labor committee seeks to reintegrate into the local economy the men who increasingly have abandoned their jobs as laborers in Israel. The medical committee is responsible for procuring and distributing medicines and coordinating with such mobile clinics as Dr. Mishal's.

An educational committee, relying on local university students, operates schools for village children when the regular system is shut down by Israeli civil administrators. The security committee is made up of village youths, or shababs, who have been at the forefront of the stone-throwing resistance to the Israelis since the revolt began.

One of the security committee's leaders, a 20-year-old high school student, said its responsibility is to guard the town's approaches, sound the alarm when the Israeli Army is spotted approaching and meet the advance with stones and molotov cocktails.

A young militant from the closed Bir Zeit University said Palestinian university students researched how the Zionists developed self-sufficiency when they started settling Palestine under the British. ''We have learned from our enemy and are now putting some of these lessons to work,'' the militant said.

In an interview in Jerusalem, Meron Benvenisti, a scholar and researcher on developments in the West Bank, said, ''What we Zionists did under the British, when confronted with a similar problem to the Palestinians today, was to try to build a parallel society and economy that existed on its own outside of the British colonial system.

''If there is a vacuum in the territories created by King Hussein's disengagement, the Palestinians are sophisticated enough and politicized enough to start a similar parallel system. I would not be surprised if they start their own kibbutzes, steal our symbols, even talk of making the desert bloom.''